Basic Trope: A young character (usually male) with a fondness for older women.
- Straight: Bob is 20 and he has a crush on Alice, who is many 40.
- Exaggerated: Bob is 15 and Alice is 90.
- Downplayed:
- Bob tends to go after women who are about five to ten years older than him, but no older.
- Alice is only two years older than Bob.
- Justified:
- Bob likes older, more mature women because he sees them as more responsible than girls his own age he's dated or is in Junior High, where the girls are going through awkward adolescence (braces, pimples, hormones, etc.)
- Bob is interested in roleplay such as teacher/student and mother/son.
- Bob lost his mother when he was young. He falls for older women because he subconsciously wants a mother figure.
- Inverted:
- Likes Older Men
- Bob is an old or at least middle-aged man who prefers younger women.
- Mrs. Robinson
- Bob is the one with multiple female admirers, all ranging from ten to twenty years older than him.
- Subverted:
- Alice is Younger than She Looks.
- "Alice" is secretly a member of a species that ages slower than humans, and both Alice and Bob are, in terms of maturity, teenagers. Whether consciously or not, Bob has picked up on that.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice has lied about her age.
- "Alice" still has experienced a time where Bob was not even born yet, and that experience (if not necessarily maturity) that only older people have is what attracts him to her.
- Parodied:
- Bob's Porn Stash consists of copies of AARP: The Magazine
. - Bob "cheats" on his girlfriend using a time machine.
- Bob falls for Alice, who is only a few days older.
- Bob's Porn Stash consists of copies of AARP: The Magazine
- Zig Zagged: Bob is attracted to both girls/women of comparable age (or younger), and to older women.
- Averted:
- Bob only dates women who are about the same age he is. He does not find women over a certain age to be attractive.
- Bob isn't interested.
- Enforced: "How about some commentary on the whole Cougar trend?"
- Lampshaded:
- "You do realize Alice is 35, don't you?"
- "How come you like older women so much, Bob?"
- Invoked: Bob puts an ad in the Personals section or uses a dating website specifically to find women older than he is.
- Exploited: Alice takes advantage of the younger Bob's attraction to her to groom and manipulate him.
- Defied: Bob will not date women significantly older than him, no matter how pretty they may be.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Bob consistently goes after women well above his age.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob isn't taken seriously as a viable romantic partner by Alice because of their age gap and she treats him like a kid, which frustrates Bob and ends his attraction to her.
- Eighteen year old Bob falls in love with what he's seen of a twenty year old Alice from twelve years before, but not so much the current version of her.
- Reconstructed: Bob forms a platonic Intergenerational Friendship with Alice and it naturally grows into romance over time.
- Played For Drama: Bob asks Alice out, and even though Alice is much older, Bob works around that and develops a relationship with her.
You can go back to Likes Older Women if you want, but isn't she a bit... you know, old for you?
